Scientists at the Vienna University of Technology have now shown that the atomic structure of the magnetite surface, which everybody had assumed to be well-established, has in fact been wrong all along. The properties of magnetite are governed by missing iron atoms in the sub-surface layer. “It turns out that the surface of Fe3O4 is not Fe3O4 at all, but rather Fe11O16”, says Professor Ulrike Diebold, head of the metal-oxide-research group at TU Wien (Vienna). The new findings have now been published in the journal “Science”.